THE NEW YORKER, MAY 15, 2017
79
A CRITIC AT LARGE
WE COULD ALL HAVE BEEN CANADIANS
Rethinking the American Revolution.
BY ADAM GOPNIK
The Revolution is the last bulwark of national myth, but in sanctifying it we forget that it was more horrific than heroic.
A it was a mistake from
the start? The Declaration of In-
dependence, the American Revolu-
tion, the creation of the United States
of America---what if all this was a
terrible idea, and what if the injus-
tices and madness of American life
since then have occurred not in spite
of the virtues of the Founding Fa-
thers but because of them? The Rev-
olution, this argument might run, was
a needless and brutal bit of slavehold-
ers' panic mixed with Enlightenment
argle-bargle, producing a country that
was always marked for violence and
disruption and demagogy. Look north
to Canada, or south to Australia, and
you will see di erent possibilities of
peaceful evolution away from Britain,
toward sane and whole, more equita-
ble and less sanguinary countries. No
revolution, and slavery might have
ended, as it did elsewhere in the Brit-
ish Empire, more peacefully and
sooner. No "peculiar institution," no
hideous Civil War and appalling af-
termath. Instead, an orderly develop-
ment of the interior---less violent,
and less inclined to celebrate the
desperado over the peaceful peasant.
We could have ended with a social-
democratic commonwealth that
stretched from north to south, a near-
continent-wide Canada.
The thought is taboo, the Revolu-
tion being still sacred in its self-directed
propaganda. One can grasp the scale
and strangeness of this sanctity only by
leaving America for a country with a
di erent attitude toward its past and
its founding. As it happened, my own
childhood was neatly divided between
what I learned to call "the States" and
Canada. In my Philadelphia grade
school, we paraded with flags, singing
ILLUSTRATION BY BRIAN STAUFFER
THE CRITICS